Threads is deliberately limiting its growth. Just this morning I saw a guy I know talk about how he really likes Threads despite the smaller number of users. He still doesn’t have any invite codes to give out.
I root for Mastodon like everyone else but as long as there is some very good improvement in discoverability and intelligent feeds, it will never be the same in function as Twitter (not X, Twitter). Especially when it currently has a fraction of the creators Twitter had.
For real, I just want to open an app and scroll. I’m not going to put effort into reading funny microblog posts. It’s why tiktok is so successful, the app is really really good at delivering relevant content.
You’ve obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control it, he needs the attention and the self worship.
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that’s all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn’t need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as “genius entrepreneur” which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can’t think of a single net positive. I think it’s an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can’t fail, personally. He’ll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn’t his fault, “it was the libs” or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
True, but it popped up on other platforms, effectively defederating. And you probably jest, but if not: 44b is a lot more than the 5k he initially offered the guy to take it down.
To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.
The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I’m pretty sure it’s why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can’t unite if there’s not a platform for us to do so on…
Take any of the top 3 social platforms, then have a look at their total number of users. If we were going to go unite, that shit probably would have happened by now. Instead we post memes about billionaires.
Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.
I mean, sure, assuming he doesn’t mind paying for that with 44 billion of his own dollar bucks, the devaluation of his other companies and the evaporation of his personal reputation.
Which is where my conspiracy theory falls apart. It mainly rests on fact that most of these decisions seem deliberate. Even an idiot by this point might start worrying about the loss of money. As much as he has, 40bil is considerable.
Considering that most of the market was stupidly overpriced, if you had 100b of worth in overpriced stock, and you had to choose between spending it or waiting for it to lose value over the next few months, what would you do?
I wouldn’t buy Twitter, fire everyone, chase off a lot of the good people and then change the name. If I felt like Twitter was the only plan, I would have negotiated a fair price, worked with the people on what was already working and wasn’t, kept everyone on until you knew how it ran, kept the worldwide, known name and probably paid my rent, lol. I’m not a “genius” in business, but I do know that this is probably the best I could have done.
Okay okay, now add the egotistical jerk trait and reevaluate the scenario?
You forget that it was an impulse offer, and he thought that most people that work at the company did not deserve to work there. He grossl overestimated how many new slave devs would be willing to replace the devs he fired. Experienced devs still get good pay and offers they don’t need to grind for cheap for Elon.
I just want to add he’s used tweets to manipulate stock prices before and it put the SEC on his ass. He’s familiar with how making public announcements like that can come across to the law at that point. Even though he wasn’t punished he knew where he the line was drawn well before he “impulsively” crossed it. Twitter was a haven for actual journalism and journalists who live by ethics knowing damn well the consequences for libel and slander. The stories they pushed had a massive influence on undoing his image and it keeps going. Same with his Saudi co investor and Larry Ellison. These guys all know what it was really worth.
It is most definitely his money. He is using his real source of wealth, Tesla stock, as collateral to secure the loans. $44 billion worth of Tesla stock. And when you sell off a huge amount, as would happen in the case of the collateral being seized, it would tank the rest of his wealth which is mostly in non-collateralized (as far as we know, in relation to Twitter) Tesla stock. Investors knowing that $44 billion of Tesla stock will be liquidated–even if slowly–by creditors would make prices tank.
Elon’s rich. Like all rich people, he is inherently immoral and opportunistic, holding no allegiance to his species nor country of residence (“world citizens” are a blight yet most countries still let them buy citizenship–that’s true class solidarity while they get us fighting over stupid shit like transgender Chess Grandmasters). I have a feel that you are correct in that he’s been earning money from the Saudis and Murdochs and many others. But the main source of his wealth is still in the market. A source which he pumped up with market manipulation because the SEC is a captured entity run exclusively for the benefit of the parasites at the top.
But it feels like arguing around the edges a bit. Elon is just not good at this. He has failed upward his entire life which is why he had to buy his way into basically every successful enterprise he is credited for. Rich people, especially nepo babies like Elon, don’t succeed because they are better. They succeed because the upper class ensures that their class succeeds, because the alternative is the working class becoming their peers. And they can’t have that.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it’s just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children’s children.
So yeah, “bad” financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.
Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.
That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.
Lol, “real cash”, look it up what he actually did. He took a loan in the name of Twitter, so he didn’t even use his own money. Pretty much financing half of the deal with the theoretical value of the company he just bought. And he took in extra money from Saudi investors, it’s not all his money.
IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he’s going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the “make some statements” phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.
So there’s no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It’s just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.
Agreed, very plausible scenario. It played out that way as well, right up to the part where his lawyers told him “you legally can’t actually walk away from this deal”.
I wonder if his goal isn’t for Twitter to be successful. I’m wondering if political influence will help to get cushty deals or legislative changes favourable to Tesla or SpaceX.
Why worry about losing $30bn from one hand when you gain $100bn in another?
The term soaring is pretty relative in this case. It’s still completely unknown to the majority of the world. It’s just like Lemmy, where the very few rigid types that absolutely couldn’t stand for one particular thing that happened to their social network will do anything, including cutting their nose off to spite their face rather than continue to use it. That’s why we’re all here and it’s why nobody else but us are coming.
Hey Elon! I hear there’s this bigger, better Public Square that you should buy. I hear it needs more fascists to platform their hate…ahem, “free” speech in. It’s called Reddit.
Musk trashed Twitter with intent, by design, and on purpose. Elon Musk is worth 95 Billion more now than when he bought Twitter.
The continued forced cognitive dissonance is the grandest example of info_corpo_kabuki i've ever seen. It's all just so fucking dumb.
Elon bought it to trash it so he could have access to Saudi markets for his electric cars and rocket ships. The face he's a fascist fucking cunt who gets to stick it to liberals where they most liked to exchange news, information and organize online was just a bonus for him.
That Twitter had essentially become accepted as an official source of communication and Elon’s purchase of Twitter so near to the time that he was experimenting with his ability to perform market manipulation on his own companies using Twitter, those things combined made me assume a large part of his reason for purchasing Twitter was to see how far he could take market manipulation and if he could influence other companies. In my darkest version of this scenario, I think Elon was just testing how far his reach is.
Maybe the verified checkmark debacle really was created by incompetence and Twitter tried quickly to fix it, or maybe it was a nefarious way to undermine legitimacy and cause a multi-billion dollar blip on the stock market. Either way, I could easily imagine Musk telling politicians and CEOs after that, “look at what I was able to do just by moving a single finger. Now imagine what I could do to you if I really wanted to.”
Oh, the conspiracy side of the story is just to sound saucy. I don’t think these were calculated moves, but I still wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to profit from his incompetence by labeling it as a flex to those he wants to control. Like, a dumbass who accidentally shoots their own foot and then shouts, “yeah bitch! And that’s MY foot! You think I won’t cap you too?!”
Well put. He’s been too busy sniffing his own farts. He’s out of touch with reality, as most ultra rich people are.
Little wonder what he is trying to turn Twitter into with X. He’s tried it several times with several other companies, all of which either failed or ejected him.
He’s even tried it with the “X” name more than once.
He is impulsively trying to manifest this idea of something into existence despite the fact that it repeatedly fails. Because the idea just isn’t good.
He wants to make the western equivalent of WeChat, when a good amount of the functionality is already hadled by Whatsapp in Europe and non-Sino Asia, and Americans are pretty resistant to the idea domestically. He failed the moment he politicized it. Hell, he failed before he even bought it because Twitter has always been a narcissistic den of toxicity–Tumblr, all grown up. There’s a reason that Jack created a Twitter clone under a different company with different everything while CEO of Twitter. It was a sinking ship, and Elon was in the wrong place at the wrong time because he thinks he really is something special.
Elon musk and Donald Trump and others are not stupid. They may act stupid. Their brains may be psychologically damaged by the distance their money allows them to put between themselves, others, and the consequences of their actions.
But they are not stupid. If they were stupid, their stupidity would sometimes bite them in the ass in a way that actually has consequences for them. Since that does not happen, we can be relatively certain that their actions are going according to plan...their plan? Maybe. Or their accountant's plan. But until a mistake costs them actual money that they cannot recoup through tax shenanigans, I find it hard to accept that they aren't just evil.
Honestly, I think he did what worked for him before. He came in like a tornado, shook things up, and then tried to fall back on the people he depends on. Those people weren’t there because they thought he was ruining what they built (former twitter guy and the other peeps). Also, he was forced to buy at a higher price so he’s constantly desperate which he isn’t used to, so he’s acting from a different place. Now he’s trying to pick up the pieces from a loud fail that he also isn’t used to with no PR, because he’s now convinced that the odds are always in his favor even when they’re are going to be a percentage of fails 100% of the time. He’s fucked up basically and hasn’t in awhile, and has no one to blame so he’s imploding.
This. He's on the hook for a relatively small percent of his personal wealth. He has a ton of government contracts, which equate to cash flow. To insulate that cash flow, he needs a loss. He can get that loss by destroying the value of Twitter, which he also artificially inflated by making an insane offer in the first place.
The thing that folks don't get is that money is different when you have none, some, and a ton. When you have none, you are effectively living moment to moment - when youre out, you spend what you have on your immediate needs, and make it work the rest of the time.
When you have some, which is most of us, you may live paycheck to paycheck, but you can still plan two weeks at a time and may have some long term plans.
Elon musk and others in his bracket could literally burn 99% of their wealth and still have more money than almost anyone else. This level of rich is marked by planning years in advance, and having contingency plans to take advantage of set backs. For example, a market crash for most of us means we lose wealth and still probably never recover it. But for Elon musk, a market crash is just a fire sale on stock. He can sell at a loss for tax benefit, or he can buy up stuff at step discounts. The benefit of wealth is that ever situation can make you more money.
Elon Musks’ favorite thing on earth is tweeting dumb shit to his mob of ass-kissers, I doubt he trashed Twitter on purpose. I think he really is just an extremely rich hair-brained dumbass.
I don’t think all of the apps have this option, but they change so quickly that they might all have it now. If I put in my search #mastodon, there is a person outline that has a + sign after it. This lets you follow any post with the #mastodon on it. It’s pretty cool to find your topics. I know Tusky has it but my version of Mastodon doesn’t.
This is how I mainly used Mastodon before Lemmy. It lets you follow topics instead of people; I prefer finding content this way. Unless a person really likes the format of Mastodon better, I’d suggest Lemmy over Mastodon for people that would rather follow topics than individuals.
I like it more than Twitter and go there way more often but I went to Twitter like once or twice a year. I like their search better and this feature but you’re right, Lemmy is way more fun.
I think they do have an algorithm but it’s super basic, Ruud from lemmy.world said they’re trying to adjust it. It’s not focused on making money but more on what you subscribe to, what your instance puts on the front page and not much else. I think they’re trying to make it more inclusive to the little instances and communities so it doesn’t get overwhelmed by a few large places.
On Mastodon? I distinctly recall reading that it did not have one but I guess these projects are fast moving so maybe it has changed or I am just mistaken.
Oh sorry, I meant lemmy. Not aware of how that works on Mastodon except that the Mastodon app has a “for you” section. Thats probably an algorithm of some type?
It’s set up weird on mobile, you have to go to the tabs in the search buttons and slide them over to find the “for you” tab. I don’t really connect with who they’re recommending so not sure how they decide. I do see a lot of things I’m interested in by following certain #hashtags though.
It has it, it’s in the search bar when you press hashtags. You put in your search hashtag and then press the little silhouette with the + sign and you’re following the hashtag in general.
If you go to settings you can add/remove tabs which includes trending. You can also add your own tab with any combination of hashtags, but pretty sure this only sorts by latest
Those are actually not groups. Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. a.gup.pe is one implementation of groups with mastodon in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
Oh you’re right, I didn’t realize there was a separate thing and that’s a great feature too. I think the author needed to add whatever I was talking about then too.
Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. a.gup.pe is one implementation of groups with mastodon (and other federated microblogging platforms) in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
EDIT: Try it yourself! Follow [email protected] from Mastodon to see what I mean. Although I don’t know that I would stay a follower of a community that large unless I wanted significant impacts on my feed. A smaller, potentially more useful, addition to your feed are things like gardening communities.
I honestly hope the Fediverse does become the predominant medium through which online social discourse takes place. Probably not going to happen, but I can dream.
As long as no single instance dominates the entirety of the Fediverse, I think it could avoid many of the pitfalls of centralized social media platforms.
I’m sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn’t care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone’s face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to “Spez’s World”, though, a lot of the people who didn’t give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
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